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Bloggers: Be a Global Voice! Bloggers around the world: Let your voice be heard! Join the global conversation. Help people around the world find about about your blog, podcasts, and other online creations. Raise global awareness about what bloggers in your country and region are talking about. American Bloggers: Help demonstrate that Americans want to know about the rest of the world Help us counter-act the tendency of U.S. mainstream media to ignore most of the world by linking to and conversing with bloggers around the world. Global Voices is a great place to find them. Here's how all bloggers - everywhere - can join the Global Voices movement: Help us write the Daily Roundup Every weekday, Global Voices offers links from bridge blogs TO DEFINITION around the world in our Daily World Blog RoundupTO CATEGORY. ("Bridge blogs" are blogs from a country or region that speak to a global audience - see more detailed definition below.) Our editors find many of these links through our aggregatorLINK, which tracks several hundred of the most active bridge blogs. Writing this roundup every day is a daunting task. To make sure we don't miss blog posts you think are important, please send us the links! Just email: globalvoices.dailylinks@gmail.com - we'll always check this account before writing each day’s roundup. When you send the email, it’s always most helpful if you can include not only the URL web address, but also a sentence or two about where the blogger is writing from and why you think it’s a story the world needs to know about. Regional roundups and translations One of the major limitations of the Global Voices is our inability to read every world language. To follow conversations in parts of the blogosphere where we don’t speak the language, we rely on contributors like Ndesanjo Macha, who translates posts from Kiswahili to English to help us understand what’s going on in East Africa. If you’re interested in helping us understand part of the globe better, please consider doing the following: - Start publishing a roundup on your own blog, translating posts into English - Let us know about it, so we can include it in the aggregator and index, and, if appropriate, talk to you about reposting it on the Global Voices blog. We’re also grateful for help in translating key documents like the Global Voices Manifesto, which contributors have already translated into ten languages. Use the GV aggregator We hope you'll find the Global Voices aggregator TO AGGREGATOR a useful tool to explore and follow blogs from different parts of the world. If you think we’re missing a blog that should be in the aggregator, your best bet is to add it to the Bridge Blog Index LINK or send an email to our suggestions box.) Help us build our index and aggregator of blogs around the world! The BridgeBlog Index TO INDEX is our project to document bridge blogs in every part of the world. Bridge blogs are blogs written explicitly to increase communication and understanding between people from different cultures. If you’re writing about Chinese politics for an American audience, or about living in Madacascar for a French audience, you’re bridge blogging. If you’re writing just for friends and family, or just for a local audience, you’re probably not. (For more on what is and what isn’t a bridge blog, see the introduction to the Bridge Blog index LINK. Or look at the type of blogs we usually feature on the Global Voices blog.) If you’re a bridge blogger, or if you find a blog you think we should include in the Index, there’s three things you can do: Email us and let us know about it. We’ve got a special mailbox - globalvoices.sites@gmail.com - where you can send us suggested sites. It’s even better if you can tell us where the blogger is located and what he or she usually writes about - that helps us figure out where to put the blog in the index. Enter it into the Index. The Bridge Blog index is a wiki, which is a webpage that anyone can edit. Find the appropriate country in the index and enter to your blog. If you’re unfamiliar with wikis, you might want to check out help page. If you’re adding a few sites, or making significant changes to the wiki, we’d appreciate it if you take a moment to register yourself - this makes it much easier for us to review changes and additions you’ve made. Comment on this page. We’ll track the comments for new additions and remove the comment once we’ve added the site to the index. Locating More Bridgeblogs You’ll notice that the BridgeBlog index is stronger in some areas that others. We could use a great deal of help finding new bridgeblogs in areas where we’re weak. Some of the best ways we’ve found to locate bridgeblogs: - Search del.icio.us tags for possible blogs. A page like http://del.icio.us/tag/tanzania will often point to Tanzanian blogs, some of which might be appropriate for the index. Experiment with different tags, including country names, names of capital cities and of languages. - Search flickr for photos, using tags. Photos tagged “Iceland” are usually by people who live in, or are travelling in Iceland. In either case, following the links to the photographer’s profile page often leads to a bridge blog. - Search webrings. Webrings are collections of sites on a common topic that link to one another. The Webring directory is searchable and is sometimes a way to locate a cluster of sites from a specific nation. - Follow links on blogrolls. A blogger like Ory Okolloh lists dozens of other Kenyan blogs on her blogroll. Often when you find one top blogger, you can find dozens of others by following blogroll links. Other ways to help us out: Comment on the blog. Comments are one of the best ways to participate in the Global Voices discussion, because they allow everyone in the community to hear your views and react to your comments. Link to the Global Voices site. Add Global Voices to the blogroll on your blog. Feel free to use the code below, which will add a nifty little button which produces this: Global Voices When you blog about stories you’ve seen on Global Voices, please consider using trackbacks or linking directly to us, so we can see what you’re saying! Mention Global Voices when talking to the press. One of reasons we’re so excited about Global Voices is that it’s already helping journalists find new voices to incorporate into stories. If you can help us reach out to journalists, it helps them find the folks we’re featuring on the site… and helps make the case that blogs aren’t just about technology and US politics.